by D W Pasulka
Buddhism. Because these are considered religions, and Star
Wars is based on and il ustrates them, it should therefore be
considered a type of scripture that, like a finger pointing to
the moon, refers to eternal and transcendent truths. Thus,
practitioners of Jediism place their fiction- based religion
within a category reserved for traditional religions.
David Chidester, Carole Cusack, and Markus Alteena
Davidsen have all studied new religious movements based
on movies, science fiction, and other nontraditional
inspirations. According to Chidester, “fakelore or fake reli-
gion, although invented, mobilized, and deployed by frauds,
can produce real effects in the real world.”22 In a more gen-
erous vein, Cusack argues, “Studying religions that openly
advertise their invention not only enriches what we know
about traditional religions, but sheds light on how science
fiction speculations and new technologies inform religious
belief and practice.”23 She also notes that invented religions
il ustrate and challenge common assumptions of tradi-
tional religions, such as the idea that real entities, like gods
or angels, intervene in human affairs. Davidsen proposes a
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new category of religion. Unlike historical religions, which
are inspired by historical events and claim to refer to the real
world, fiction- based religions “draw their main inspiration
from fictional narratives that do not claim to refer to the ac-
tual world, but create a fictional world of their own.”24
My interpretation is somewhat different. Jediism
exists within a milieu of beliefs and practices about
extraterrestrials, galactic visitors, and UFOs that posits their
realism, if not as a contemporary reality, then as a future one.
They are as real to some people as gods, Jesus, and the var-
ious Buddhas. Confidence in their existence is bolstered by
cultural authorities like NASA’s chief scientist Ellen Stofan,
who announced, “There will be strong indications of alien
life within a decade and definite evidence of it within 20 to
30 years. We know where to look. We know how to look. In
most cases, we have the technology, and we’re on a path to
implementing it.”25 Many UFO- based religions profess the
belief that these alien “entities” have left us artifacts; indeed,
such “artifacts” inspire Tyler and James to create their inno-
vative technologies. Jediism and other belief systems about
extraterrestrials and UFOs are so powerful because they re-
place, supplant, or even, as in Eddy’s case, supplement and
revise traditional religious beliefs. They incorporate the re-
alism of historical religions and project it into the future.
A basic tenet of these belief systems is that we will find non-
human life elsewhere in the universe. It is only a matter of
time. What’s more, these ideas are supercharged because this
potential nonhuman intelligent life exists in our world and in
our universe, not in a past of questionable historical veracity
and not in a nonmaterial postdeath reality.
The context that makes this new form of religiosity
possible is digital. Historian of religion Robert Orsi
W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 3 9
challenged scholars to understand the roles of gods and
sacred entities, like saints, as autonomous agents.26 These
examples of how Star Wars characters inhabit the ordinary
lives of millions of people offer a clue to an answer. We live
within a media- saturated world where fictionalized factual
productions like those created by Impossible Factual are
beamed through screens into the brains of viewers and be-
come real memories that are integrated into the cultural
and social imaginary, as well as into viewers’ bodies, be-
cause a brain is a body. We cannot understand this devel-
opment within the conceptual frameworks of the real and
the unreal, or the humans and the gods, or even the body
and the mind. We must understand it at its source— from
within the screen itself.
I M AG I NAT I O N E X T E R I O R I Z E D
Seeing is believing, we say. Yet, at least since Plato,
philosophers have shown that the “seeing and believing”
construct is deceptive. This idea is known as external world
skepticism: we cannot assume that what we see or identify
with our senses is real.27 But the issue becomes much more
complicated when what one sees is processed as real, even if
it isn’t real in the conventional sense. Reflecting on a talk by
“alien abductee” Whitley Strieber about the experiences that
informed his best- selling novel, Communion, Jeffrey Kripal
notes the role played by popular culture: “One evening he
[Whitley] explained to us that he was perfectly aware that his
visionary experience of the visitors was deeply informed by
the bad sci- fi B movies that he had seen in such numbers as a
kid in the cold war 1950s in southern Texas.”28
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Whitley’s consumption of Hol ywood’s B movies
occurred many years ago. Things have changed a lot since
then. We don’t have to imagine how this experience has
changed. We just have to flip open our laptops or engage
our telephones— or even just consult our memories— to
recognize (re- cognize) the reality. It’s as if our imaginations
have become exterior to ourselves, existing out there in our
media, and our media then determines what is in our heads.
Where does the spectator end and the screened media event
begin? Where do we draw these boundaries? As Andy Clark
has observed in his research into extended cognition, the
assumption that cognition is brain- bound, or that it just
occurs within the skul , is wrong. Cognition occurs within a
network that extends into the environment.29
The modern binary of “human” and “machine” is shown
to be the real fake, not new religious forms, populated as they
are with nonhuman persons and intelligences. Technology
scholar N. Katherine Hayles argues that humans coevolve
with their technologies.30 She uses the term “technogenesis”
to refer to this relationship. Technologies are not exterior
to humans, she says, but as we use them, invent them, and
incorporate them as media and biotechnologies, we merge
with them in an ever more complicated and inextricable re-
lationship. Some have speculated that this is part of an ev-
olutionary process of the human species, and will impact
longevity and the human ability to travel off the planet.
Humans— Homo sapiens sapiens— will evolve into a different
kind of posthuman being. Philosopher Susan Schneider has
written that if humans eventual y do encounter nonhuman
intelligence, that intelligence would be in a postbiological
form— a form of artificial intelligence (AI)— because this is
the form that “the most advanced alien civilization” would
W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 4 1
take.31 This makes sense. Already we biological humans have
sent our own AI, the Rover, to Mars to explore the red planet.
The relevance of Robert Ager’s analysis of the monolith
in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his conclusion that the mono-
lith is a metaphor for the cinema screen, seems inescapable
in light of research into cognition in media and memory.
Ager’s observation suggests that Kubrick was even more
of a genius than previously thought, as he somehow knew,
perhaps intuitively if not consciously, that cinema and its
spectators exist in an inextricable and intimate relationship.
Ager notes, “After the release of 2001, Stanley Kubrick openly
stated that he created a film that was intended to bypass the
conscious rationalizations of its audience and sink straight
into the unconscious.”32 Several scenes in the movie focus on
the eye, either the artificial eyes of computers and machines
or the eyes of the characters in the movie. The cinema
screen– human eye relationship is especial y well il ustrated
in the “stargate scene,” in which astronaut David Bowman
approaches the planet Jupiter, where a monolith has been
identified. The monolith represents nonhuman intelligence.
As Bowman approaches, the object floats toward him and
then morphs into “the stargate,” which appears as a screen
with brilliant and colorful flashing lights. Bowman’s own eye
morphs to reflect these lights, and it becomes difficult to dis-
tinguish between the stargate and the astronaut’s own retina.
The boundaries between the spectator and the monolith (as
colorful screen) have been erased, or are indistinguishable.
At the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s book, in the hotel room
where Bowman eventual y finds himself, there is a television
above the bed. In the movie, the television is replaced by the
monolith. The monolith is in front of the bed, where one
cannot help but look into it. Ager notes that in the book, the
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reference to the idea that Bowman himself is living within
a movie is explicit: “His feeling that he was inside a movie
set was almost literal y true.” This point is made clear in the
movie: just before Bowman transforms into the starchild, the
audience sees the actual movie camera crew reflected in his
helmet. In these scenes, Kubrick il ustrates the imperceptible
influence of cinema.
After Ager cracked the code of the monolith and posted
his analysis on YouTube in 2007, he received hundreds of
thousands of positive responses. Apparently, the time had
at last come to understand the movie— and the monolith.
Oddly, at about the same time, a series of ads appeared on
YouTube featuring key scenes from 2001 with the iPhone
superimposed on the monolith. The ads were popular, and
there is now a proliferation of videos that feature the mon-
olith and other scenes from the movie in conjunction with
various Apple products, some of them authorized by Apple
and others produced as entertainment by fans. At least in
popular culture, where it matters most, the truth about the
monolith has been revealed: there is a human– monolith con-
tinuum, the boundaries of which are very vague (Figure 4.2).
There is a dark side to the monolith. This towering ob-
sidian object appears in key scenes in which humans experi-
ence an evolutionary shift, as in its first appearance, where it
helps a group of hominids by somehow teaching them how
to use a tool— a bone. In a later scene, a hominid throws the
bone into the air and it travels into space to become a satel-
lite. The bone, which, used as a weapon, enabled one group
of hominids to dominate another, is now a satellite, and the
cinematic association of the two suggests that the latter is a
modern tool of dominance. Interestingly, in one of the later
Apple ads, this entire scene takes place on the screen of an
W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 4 3
Figure 4.2. Monolith presaging the iPhone, from 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Source: MovieStil sDB.com.
iPhone. Perhaps the “dominance” association between the
bone, the satellite, and the iPhone in the ad is unintentional.
Perhaps it reflects a truth.
There are other dark elements in the movie, one of which
is a program funded by the Department of Defense in which
subjects are treated with hypnosis, drugs, and special effects
to make them believe that they are in contact with alien
intelligences. The Department of Defense program is part
of a public relations effort by which the government hopes
to acclimate humans to the reality of extraterrestrials. This
minor scene in the movie provides an interesting frame-
work for interpreting the cultural development of the alien
abduction phenomenon, which has rested on the idea that
humans can access suppressed memories through hyp-
notic regression. The entire premise of John Mack’s book
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens relies on his ability
to uncover others’ memories of alien abductions through
hypnosis. I have encountered several such experiences in my
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own work, reported by people who had not been hypnotized,
but this tradition does need to be reassessed given what is
now known about how media technologies influence how
humans think and what they remember.
David Halperin, a scholar of the Merkabah, the Jewish
mystical tradition that arises from the visionary aspects of
Ezekiel’s wheel, has written extensively about the UFO phe-
nomenon.33 Halperin has examined the case of Betty and
Barney Hil , whose alien abduction narrative was the first to
be popularized in the media. It may also have been the first
time hypnosis was used on people who claimed to have been
abducted by aliens. This established a precedent that would
become a convention for alien abductees. The literature, both
supporting and debunking the Hil s’ experience, is extensive,
and a lot of it focuses on their hypnosis sessions. What if
what they remembered was not real but virtual y real? For
the record, I am not discounting the possibility that Betty
and Barney had a real experience, but I am placing their ex-
perience within a new framework that considers the cogni-
tive science of media.
T H E H I L L C A S E , M E D IA ,
A N D M E M O RY
Betty Hill and Barney Hil , an interracial couple, were both
active in the civil rights movement. They lived in New
Hampshire. On September 19, 1961, they were driving on
a rural road in that state, when they spotted a light that
resembled a falling star but moved differently. They stopped
and used binoculars to try to identify it, but then got back
into their car and continued their journey. The star, however,
W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 4 5
sky above them. At one point, it came toward their vehicle,
almost filling the windshield with its light. Frightened, they
stopped the car, and Barney got out with a pistol he was
carrying. Then they returned home and tried to sleep.
Two days later, Betty called the nearby Pease Air Force
Base. It was another day before Major Paul W. Henderson
returned the cal . Betty described the details of what they
had seen, but she did not mention the presence of beings
or extraterrestrials. The Air Force file says that Henderson
explained the sighting as a probable misidentified planet.
After Betty made her report to the Air Force base, she went
to the local library and checked out a book about UFOs by
Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine aviator who was head of the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a ci-
vilian research organization. This was Betty’s “book encounter.”
In the book Keyhoe contends that there are alien beings that are
more technological y advanced than humans and that the US
Department of Defense is keeping the evidence secret. As Betty
and Barney recovered from their experience, Betty believed that
more had happened than they had at first surmised. Additional y,
Barney had been experiencing headaches and nightmares since
the event. Betty sought out a qualified hypnotist. In hypnotic
regression, the hypnotist would uncover memories of an ab-
duction event. Betty and Barney related, while hypnotized, that
they believed that alien beings had abducted them, taken them
aboard a UFO craft, and then examined them.
David Halperin’s analysis of the Hill incident is relevant
in that he highlights its link to the popular media of the time:
In hypnotic regression on February 22, Barney described the
eyes of one of the UFO beings as “slanted . . . [b] ut not like a
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Chinese.” In a sketch he made under hypnosis, the eyes look
indefinably sinister, malevolent: the irises and pupils, not dis-
tinguished from each other, are close together, while the rest
of the eyes trail away upward, toward the sides of the being’s
head. Barney later told [author] John Fuller that the eyes con-
tinued around to the sides of their heads, so that it appeared